August 25, 2013

5 things you should know about Google’s cloud platform
Speaking about Google Cloud Datastore, the hybrid SQL-NoSQL database that powers App Engine and is now a standalone service, DeMichillie said, “We’re running about 4 trillion operations, read/write requests, per month on [it] today.” Granted, that count includes both internal Google user and external customer use, but, he noted, Snapchat is a Google cloud customer and accounts for more than a handful of transactions everyday.


Apple might be in bigger trouble than Microsoft
Still, famed columnist and economist Paul Krugman dwells not on this human aspect, but another: the idea that Microsoft might depend on more conservative humans than does Apple. In a New York Times piece posted Saturday, Krugman ponders the symmetries between Apple and Microsoft. He concludes that Cupertino might just have a more troubled future than Redmond.His logic comes down to the idea that Microsoft's core purchaser is a conservative IT manager, while Apple's is the mere fickle human consumer.


Geek of the Week: Julie Kientz, UW researcher and one of the world’s top innovators under 35
“I’m incredibly honored and flattered to be included amongst so many inspirational people,” the UW professor told us. She’s doing some pretty special work at the UW. As a human-computer interaction expert, Kientz works with her colleagues and students on how technology can help improve lives. For example, she’s using technology to assist parents of young children in tracking developmental progress, and to help people in understanding how much sleep personally impacts their everyday lives.


Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source
Gollakota says the devices could be programmed to work together in networks in which data travels by hopping from device to device to cover long distances and eventually connect to nodes on the Internet. He imagines many of a person’s possessions and household items being part of that battery-free network, making it possible to easily find a lost item like your keys. “These devices can talk to each other and know where it is,” he says.


The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography
Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the CEO of a 30-billion-dollar company. She is a woman in an industry dominated by men. In a world where corporations are expected to serve shareholders before anyone else, she is obsessed with putting the customer experience first. Worth at least $300 million, she isn’t afraid to show off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small, suburban home with an apple tree out front, but Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel.


The Information Management Hierarchy of Needs
In a 1943 paper, Abraham Maslow introduced a new theory on motivation that has subsequently been called “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” His premise is that humans demonstrate patterns in motivation ranging from the most basic needs (physiological) through to self-actualization, and that the most basic needs must be fulfilled before someone has the ability to focus on higher-level needs. In other words, someone needs to have food, water and shelter before they are motivated to seek friendship, confidence and achievement.


Exploring OpenFlow scalability in cloud provider data centers
"It's challenging to build any control plane for a large multi-tenant data center, regardless of the technology," McKeown said. "The amount of state, the number of VMs, the number of tenant policies, the number of service-level agreements, the number of flows … will create a challenge for the control plane -- SDN or not, virtualization or not -- particularly when VMs and workloads are moving around."


Knowing what it takes to generate a minimum lovable product
The MVP is a curse for ambitious technology companies that want to grow. In an increasingly transactional world, growth comes from long-term customer happiness. And long-term customer happiness comes when customers adore your product or service and want you to succeed. You should be thinking about what it will take for customers to love you, not tolerate you. Really think about the type of mindset change it would take. What would it take to create a minimum lovable product (MLP)?


A Camera That Sees like the Human Eye
“Your eye and my eye are digital cameras too. [They’re] just a different kind of digital camera,” says Tobi Delbruck, the chief scientific officer at iniLabs. ...  An ordinary camera will take in everything it sees, storing the information to be processed later. This uses up a lot of power and a lot of space. Neurons in the eye, however, fire only when they sense a change—such as when a particular part of a scene gets brighter or dimmer.


Deep cyberattacks cause millions in losses for U.S. banks
To draw attention away from their activities, the banks saw attackers execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks prior to the wire transfers taking place, said Litan, who also blogged about the issue recently. Banks are frequent targets for DDoS attacks, which aim to overwhelm web-based applications with volumes of malicious traffic intended to cause the applications to stop responding.



Quote for the day:

"Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant." -- Paul Coelho

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